Welcome to the Hairston LabDepartment of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University

About our lab

Research in the Hairston Lab focuses on the interactions within and between processes at microevolutionary, population, community, and ecosystem scales. We study primarily freshwater organisms (including zooplankton, phytoplankton, insects and fish). Inland aquatic habitats such as lakes and ponds have boundaries and directional inputs that make ecological interactions intense and inescapable. Ecological and evolutionary forces are easily identified and relatively easy to study as patterns in nature, experimentally in field enclosures, and in laboratory microcosms. .